Low-Volume Roads in South Asia: a Marginalized Lifeline - SAR-CLIMATE

Low-Volume Roads in South Asia: a Marginalized Lifeline

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An aerial view of a village road in Jashore, Bangladesh (Photo by: TM009/Shutterstock.com)

Contrary to popular belief, low-volume roads are characterized by their reciprocal socio-economic benefits instead of their traffic levels. According to a 2016 study, they are either the starting or ending points of the global economy and culture.

Low-volume roads go beyond engineering – they are a vessel for sustainable development.

Most rural roads in South Asia are low-volume, but they are rich in relevance and operate as critical infrastructures for local communities. Therefore, their administration is a manifestation of swinging between technical and non-technical interventions. Authorities must view them as a civil-engineering responsibility that should coexist sustainably with the surrounding ecosystem to protect nature and livelihoods.

According to a 2020 World Bank estimate, nearly 80 percent of the Nepalese population and over 60 percent of Bangladeshis live in rural areas. These high rural populations mean that their health, livelihoods, and socio-economic functions depend on the functionality of low-volume roads, while their local economies rely on locally-produced commodities and a systemic lack of redundancy in road networks.

Low-volume roads go beyond engineering – they are a vessel for sustainable development.

Although the design, speed, and geometric design requirements are lower in low-volume roads, a reliable and safe design remains as crucial as is for higher administrative classes of roads.

Thus, while mobility, in terms of free-flow speed, can be compromised, accessibility and connectivity of low-volume roads are enormously vital for overall network performance.

That is because rural and low-volume roads constitute a vast share of countries’ road networks and are often the sole link of accessibility to many human settlements. Accordingly, the necessity of prevention and resilience interventions is pronounced due to their criticality for users and the post-hazard-affected population.

However, the regionally-practiced design principle takes traffic loading as the benchmark for indicating the importance of road sections and as a governing factor for allocating design resources, which does not necessarily consider the consequence of the link’s failure.

It aggravates even further when many national design standards in South Asia consider only the number of commercial vehicles per day under this underlying assumption that other means of road transport contribute insignificantly to pavement deterioration.

Although this assumption is itself arguable from the pavement engineering point of view, even if we take that as a given, it makes this design policy more exclusive and, consequently, low-volume roads rather marginalized. Hence, it is deficient in reflecting the true application of a road segment, flawed in the inclusion of the whole spectrum of present loads, and markedly incapable of representing the relevance of road segments to the perceived social system aspects that we, as engineers, aim to serve inclusively.

A community should not be punished twice because of lower economic attributions and contributions since they have not been privileged to accommodate larger business opportunities.

It is perhaps not justified that we fail in building resilience into low-volume roads while expecting their users, often comprise of socially vulnerable groups, to be resilient.

To overcome this challenge, under the adverse impact of sudden-onset hazards in rural areas, it is essential to approach the concept of resilient road infrastructures from the network level and introduce criticality-based failure risk-informed classification for the structural design.

A risk-informed classification can provide a sufficient understanding of how the failure of a certain link leaves a more severe impact on the public and network as a whole.

Therefore, although the geometric design remains constant, the improvement of structural design aspects can prevent the closure of critical links under the force of cumulative climatic and non-climatic stressors.

Including criticality in terms of inter-system and intra-system dependencies is integrating the consequence of a probable failure of road assets for users and non-users into the design and planning approach.

It determines the level of design (parametric values or necessary investigation level for design input) with higher awareness of the complex and interconnected risk landscape, which no longer excludes low-volume roads and rural communities.

Contrary to the functional classification of roads based on sole traffic volume, the failure of a risk-informed standpoint can account for aspects that traditional classification fails to grasp.

Every time we contribute to the design and construction of a reliable road, a child reaches school, a pregnant mother accesses proper medical services, a farmer sells their goods in a bigger market, a family flourishes, and a community grows.

Developing non-redundant low-volume roads that operate safely amidst climatic hazards and stressors is verifiably ethical from both utilitarian and deontological normative theories, economically viable, and technocratically justified.

The writer is Regional Transport Specialist, ADPC, and can be reached at:
milad.zamanifar@adpc.net

About Post Author

zandre

zandre.vanstraten@adpc.net

http://www.adpc.net

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